I have one slight advantage with respect to the SDMB’s platform, and it’s that I’m not a hothouse flower whose only forum involvement is with SDMB. So I was exposed to Discourse months before the transition here and my familiarity with other Discourse boards paid immediate dividends in competence and ease of use.
YMMV, obviously.
[geezer]
You youngsters are all spoiled. This is fantastic message board software. So was the old software and versions before that going back until you get to ASCII message boards with nothing faster than a 1200baud dial up connection. That’s what ‘virtually everything is awful’ message boards were. It’s Star Trek level stuff now.
[/geezer]
The old software wasn’t some one off code someone hobbled together just for us. There’s plenty of other vB boards. When we first made the switch, a number of people mentioned the same thing (already understanding how everything worked), but the that argument could have just as easily been made if we had switched from something else to vB.
I’m glad you and @Riemann mentioned the lack of stability. It’s easy for some of us (like me) to forget that. It reminded me that I took some screenshots back then, and we had at least one long thread about the frequent crashes.
Here are some pics. The first crash pic is from Dec 2019 and the last is from Mar 2020 — from my notes that means we had systemic crash problems through those 3+ months. It was awful.
And here is one of the old threads where many of us complained.
And this reminds me that I was a late adopter of the new Discourse. I stayed away for many months, and then slowly made my way back.
Discourse is soooo much better!
(4 screenshots)
(And here is an old thread)
I’ve gotten used to it. But, I’m not on here as much just because the board isn’t as active as it once was. We’ve discussed that issue a lot over the last couple years. So, it’s fine and definitely better than the last year or so of v bulletin crashing all the time and getting locked out for days.
I think the only thing I still really don’t get on with about Discourse is the display of post dates. Zombie threads with posts dated Jun '17 (5 years ago) vs others dated Jun 17 (15 days ago). I don’t know if this is configurable.
My understanding is that part of the problem was that we were running an ancient version of vBulletin and also that the server was way underpowered but now we’re running a current version of Discourse on their servers. I think part of the reason for moving was the lower operating and admin cost of Discourse. (Though I don’t understand why two years on, no one has been appointed board administrator.)
I didn’t like the new format at first, but it’s grown on me. It has notable improvements: You can run a search as many times as you want, whereas the old one had a 1-search-per-minute limit, you can get notified when someone replies to you (the old site never told me if someone responded to or quoted me,) you can edit posts up to 15 minutes after making them (the old site had a five-minute limit,) and the polls are a lot niftier.
I was so frickin’ fed up with the crashes and the site being down that I was happy with the switch. My few frustrations were strictly due to my own incompetence, and I knew it. I just wish TubaDiva could have lived long past the initial mass griping. I mentally thank her often for getting us over here.
I was right there with you when the change first happened – grating, terrible hatred. It got better. One thing that really helped was playing around with Themes (go into your profile, click on Preferences, and try them out if you haven’t.) There are also some custom scripts floating around, pretty easy to install at the browser level, one of which got the pages here looking like I want them to. (Feel free to PM me, or of course ask anyone in the Site Feedback forum.)
I second the question about what you’re having issues with. There are a lot of things that Discourse just does differently, but is still available.
There are gripes I have about Discourse, like how opinionated it is. But I mentioned them in the recent revival of a similar thread. It rarely seems to be the stuff most people are talking about.
Also, it helps that I’ve fixed a lot of things that bugged me in my UserScript, including some things not yet released to the public.
That’s about the only thing that still bugs me, now that I’ve adapted to the current software. There has got to be a way to get much better clarity and less ambiguity.
The old system was broke, buggered and verging on unusable.
The easiest way to face change is if the status quo is not possible, which was self-evidently the case.
So my mindset was that if TPTB decided that Discourse was the platform to go forward then I’d adapt, appreciate and advocate their determination.
There is nothing material to my SDMB experience which is worse, some things which are a wash, a lot that is better, and a whole lot that is materially better. Bravo to TPTB. YMMV but I don’t care.
I find discourse much worse on the computer, but it’s excellent on a phone. I didn’t even have a smartphone until after the move to discourse, so with no access except my desktop I didn’t post for probably around 8 months.
Now I almost exclusively access the SDMB on my phone. It makes me happy about discourse rather than annoyed like on the computer. Whatever virtues the old vBulletin system had, phone support was not one of them.
I have many old posts that do not render properly in discourse, so that is something materially worse in my experience. Normally I wouldn’t really care, but the fantasy league here I’m in has been going for a dozen years, and the first 10 years of threads (which we link back to and occasionally reference) are full of tons of junk because discourse doesn’t render old vBulletin code properly.
It would also be nice to be able to use colors without having to switch to a janky font.
EDIT: Along the same line, if you do a google search for a topic and it finds old SDMB threads from before discourse, do those google links even work?
EDIT 2: Looks like yes they do, sweet! I tested by searching ‘airplane on a treadmill SDMB’, worked fine.
It used to be that sometimes the board worked instantly, and sometimes it didn’t work at all. We’ve replaced that with always working very slowly. I guess that’s an improvement, in that at least it’s consistent, but it doesn’t feel like much of an improvement.
And there are a ton of little things here that are the way they are because the designers of Discourse didn’t understand anything about how message boards work, and so made up all of their own ad-hoc “solutions” to everything. Like using usernames as primary records, instead of ID numbers, with the result that the only characters allowed in names are those allowed in URLs. Or their own custom set of text marker codes, that make it almost impossible to correctly spell that show about Korean War doctors. Or the fact that we actually have three different sets of text marker codes here, that overlap for some things but not others, so you can’t do everything in any one set of codes. Or the listing of all times as relative to the present (which present? It updates in some contexts but not others), instead of actual times, which are almost always more useful.
It took me a long time to warm up to our current platform. I still miss the old one’s features, but not its problems. I can do most of what I want here, and I’ve given up doing other things on the board due to difficulty in making it do what it used to do for me easily.
Life goes on
The worst thing about the move to Discourse is how many links were permanently broken.
My main memories of the old software eventually boils down to my frustration with the timeouts, and my dislike of the search feature. Everything else is lost to me, so I like the new software infinitely better. Oh, and I like the dark mode on my iPad.
